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Marked
I belong to a very exclusive club. I paid the highest price imaginable to be a member. I am surrounded in this club by the most...

Anna Sweat
Jan 21, 20195 min read
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What to Give a Broken Heart at Christmas
This is not a season of joy for everyone. Let's just start there. The focus on family, on togetherness, emphasizes for some where they...

Anna Sweat
Dec 23, 20185 min read
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Grief Multiplied
One loss does not prepare you for another. My father passed away last week. He was 77 years old. He had a pacemaker, a bevy of bad...

Anna Sweat
Dec 10, 20184 min read
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Ghost Town
I live in another woman's house. I drive another woman's car. I wear her clothes and sleep in her bed. Sometimes, I stand in her closet...

Anna Sweat
Nov 15, 20183 min read
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Living When You Don't Want To
I can recall with perfect clarity the exact moment when I first realized I wanted to die. It was four weeks to the day after our daughter...

Anna Sweat
Oct 3, 20186 min read
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Accommodating Grief
Every day, I make accommodations for this grief. Every. Single. Day. Without exception. On a "good" day, that might look like excusing...

Anna Sweat
Sep 17, 20187 min read
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Envy: The Lost Stage of Grief
When you lose someone, everyone begins talking about the stages of grief, ticking them off to you one by one: denial, anger, bargaining,...

Anna Sweat
Sep 4, 201811 min read
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Progress in Grief: What It Actually Looks Like
A year has passed since we lost Ev. Well, for everyone else anyway. For myself, this has been one, long, agonizing moment. The dictionary...

Anna Sweat
Aug 28, 20186 min read
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A Love Letter To My Predecessor
I wrote this letter to myself, to the me on the precipice of disaster, on the last day, final moments, of what was my life. It is a...

Anna Sweat
Aug 1, 20188 min read
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Our Story
In The Before, we were a happy family of five—myself, my husband, our oldest daughter who had just turned 20, Evelyn who was only weeks...

Anna Sweat
Jul 22, 201813 min read
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The Universal Message of Trauma
Trauma has a mouth. Not a quiet, puckered, whispery, thin-lipped mouth with careful, clipped words. Trauma's mouth is more like a...

Anna Sweat
Jul 1, 20184 min read
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Grieve, Pray, Love — Not Necessarily in that Order
The following quote was taken from an Instagram post Elizabeth Gilbert, the best-selling author of Eat Pray Love, wrote just last week...

Anna Sweat
Jun 17, 20185 min read
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Stolen Tomorrows
Last week, my daughter and I loaded ourselves into the car and drove the hour and ten minutes to Santa Fe High School. I'm not sure what...

Anna Sweat
Jun 3, 20184 min read
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A Dose of Awe
I never much felt like I was made for this world, if I'm being entirely honest. I don't care about the things I'm supposed to care about....

Anna Sweat
May 8, 20186 min read
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What Bereaved Parents Wish Everyone Else Understood
Maybe it's presumptuous of me to write this post. After all, I am only one broken-hearted mother. Who am I to speak for the parents of...

Anna Sweat
Apr 18, 201811 min read
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Happiness, The New Normal, and Other Common Myths
Happiness is a myth. I should know. I have paid the ultimate price for my liberation from it. It is a thing of bedtime stories, the...

Anna Sweat
Mar 28, 20186 min read
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Unraveling
I have spent the last two days trying not to die. That's not exaggerating or overstating it. I am not being melodramatic. It's not a...

Anna Sweat
Mar 13, 20185 min read
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The Birthday Letter
Evelyn, My beloved girl, today you would be 19. A year ago, I never dreamed that this is how I would be celebrating your 19th birthday. A...

Anna Sweat
Mar 6, 20184 min read
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The High Cost of Great Loss
Death comes at a steep price. This grief has cost me much. My heart. My soul. Or at least a large chunk of each. My family as they were,...

Anna Sweat
Feb 22, 20186 min read
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Unanswerable Questions
The grieving mind is a swirling, bitter soup of unanswerable questions, a miserable cocktail of what ifs and if onlys. My mind is steeped...

Anna Sweat
Feb 13, 20185 min read
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